“I think we may have been (visited already). We don’t know for sure,” the Democratic presidential front-runner told The Conway Daily Sun during a campaign stop in New Hampshire last week. …

She also noted that campaign chairman John Podesta, who served as White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton and in Barack Obama’s White House, is a major fan of UFO theories.

“He has made me personally pledge we are going to get the information out,” Clinton said. “One way or another. Maybe we could have, like, a task force to go to Area 51.”

Ahem. These two had eight years to pursue any curiosity they had about UFOs and Area 51. It’s one thing to pander to the UFO conspiracy theorists as an outsider. It’s another to do it as part of the Clinton Restoration. What exactly would have changed since Hillary and Podesta left the Clinton White House 15 years ago, and Podesta left the Obama White House in February of last year?

For one thing, we’ve had confirmation on the use of Area 51 for more than two years. Like most rational adults assumed, the Nevada base was used to test the U-2 spy plane and other potential intel platforms. ABC News covered the declassified documents in August 2013:

Although the report makes no mention of the sensational stories that have played out in pop culture for decades, it turns out that Area 51 was started as a testing site for the government’s U-2 spy plane. The report, more than 400 pages, is titled “Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and Oxcart Programs, 1954-1974.”

The U-2 spy planes were commonly used by the United States during the Cold War in reconnaissance missions around the globe.

Officials and former employees have previously acknowledged in passing the existence of the facility and how it was used for testing U-2 planes, but this is the first time the U.S. government has openly referred to Area 51 and given specifics on its operations. The report also features a map of the area. …

“U-2 and later OXCART flights accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s and most of the 1960s,” according to the documents.

The documents don’t cover activity after 1974, but most of the UFO “sightings” took place well before that point. Those afterward are most likely related to testing of the successor platforms to the U-2, such as the SR-71 and other potential systems.

This is nothing more than an attempt to pander to conspiracy theorists, and it will only work on those who somehow missed that the Clintons had to have been part of the “conspiracy” if it lasted this long anyway. Not for the first time, the rest of us will wonder when presidential candidates will act like adults and insist others join reality as well.